5 Fitness Lessons Applicable to Daily Life
If you want to improve in any area of life, these will help keep you on track.
- Set a Goal With a Deadline
Many people sign up for gym memberships in January only to quit soon after. 80% of people who sign up in January will quit within five months. 14% will quit before the end of February. These are not very optimistic numbers but there is reason for optimism. 94% of those people who set goals remained active 9 months later.
It seems that it is not enough to have good intentions. What is needed is to have clear meaning and direction behind our actions.
Compare the actions behind two runners. One is training for a half-marathon which he is already signed up for in three months. The other has the goal of running three times a week but without a deadline or clear finish-line, pun intended.
Who do you think is going to be motivated to remain consistent?
The same lesson is true for us in other areas of our lives. We all start with good intentions but without a clear purpose it is easy to go astray. We end up throwing a dart at the wall and circling wherever it lands, whether we hit the target or not.
If the goal is to write more, set out the objective of what that looks like and choose someone to hold you accountable. Give yourself a deadline, just as if you were participating in a race, and then evaluate how your time of “practice” went.
Are you ready to increase your workload or do you need to back off? Be honest with yourself, set a new goal and then work your plan. Set a new goal with a new deadline and keep moving forward.
2. Progressive Overload
Our bodies are naturally lazy. Every system that makes us who we are wants to do the least amount of work necessary to meet the demands put on it. This is why if we don’t do resistance training we will lose muscle mass. If we sit on the couch or remain sedentary for a decent length of time we are telling our respiratory and cardiovascular sytem that they need not be efficient, nothign great is requried of them.
In order to grow stronger or more efficient then we have to regularly increase the demand we put on our bodies to develop muscle and aerobic capacity.
Slow and steady increases in either weight or intensity will result in incremental gains that may seem small at first but when compounded over time will produce great results.
Going back to the example of writing, that may mean writing one sentence a day to start out. There are examples of storytellers using one or two simple sentences each day to craft stories and journal their lives. Matthew Dicks calls his method homework for life and a link to it can be found here. https://matthewdicks.com/homework-for-life/.
Going from writing nothing to an article a day is not realistic for most people. What all of us can do though is write a sentence. Write a paragraph a day. Slowly build that up and teach our minds what the new expectation is and go from there. Allow for the small discomfort that comes with growth until it becomes easy. Then bump it up a little more, and a little more.
Progressively increase your activity until you arrive where you want to be safely and with the energy to continue.
3. Don’t Skip Mondays
Monday sets the tone for the week. If you want to get to the gym three days a week and have sufficient rest as well, you have to start on Monday. If not you are already behind.
Getting exercise in on Monday is a reminder that fitness is a priority. Skipping it on the first day of the week is like hitting the snooze button on your health. It can wait.
Anything worth doing is going to involve a little difficulty and resistance because it means we have to get out of our comfort zone. Typically the most difficult part though is simply getting started.
Sit down and write for fifteen minutes if that is all you have. Send in your resume to the prospective employer. Schedule coffee with that person whom you have been avoiding the difficult conversation.
Whatever the next first step is towards your goal, take it. Do it immediately when you have the chance. Hard actions never get easier when they are put off and almost always the exact opposite is true.
If you want to avoid getting stuck in whatever it is you are pursuing take the advice of coaches everywhere and don’t skip Mondays.
4. You Can’t Out Exercise Bad Nutrition
I think almost half of the fitness magazines at any point in time must be advertising how to get six-pack abs in no time at all. What they don’t tell you is what any decent coach will tell you bluntly, abs are not built in the gym, they are made in the kitchen.
If you want to get the most out of your training and have visible results the most important thing you can do is eat well. Changes in body composition, whether it be building muscle, losing fat, or any combination of the two, depends largely on diet.
Training is only part of the process. If the average gym session lasts one hour, the remaining fifteen will have just as much influence or more about how quickly someone will see results.
The principle for our life then is to not overlook the obvious and basic decisions we make every day in an attempt to find the silver bullet or quick success. Lasting change requires a reorganization of everything we do. It is not enough to have a flurry of activity for a short period of time followed by self-sabotaging behavior.
Respect the hard work that you are doing just as you would if it were someone else. Encourage yourself and focus on the positive growth that you can see. We can be so hopeful for others and then turn around and be our own worst critics. Let yourself succeed and work towards what you want.
As you work and put in the effort remember that you can’t outwork or out exercise bad nutrition, so feed yourself well.
5. Just Do Something
Said in other words, some beats none. Not every day is going to be a personal best. We all get tired and worn down. We can get sick or hung-over. Some days we just don’t feel like going to the gym or doing anything physical.
At times those days end up being some of the best workouts. Other times they are exactly what we expected when we rolled out of bed stopped up and with a sore back. Just going to the gym on those days is a victory.
It is one more vote cast for the person we are growing to be, who we want to be. It is one more step in the direction where we want to go, no matter how small.
Whether it is physical fitness or any other area of our life, what matters is not giving up. Just showing up counts a great deal.
It can be easy to compare what we are doing with the activity of others, usually those who are further along the same path we are headed down. We can feel beat up or like what we are doing is insignificant or pales in comparison.
Stop comparing then and just do something. Go for a walk. Write a paragraph. Read a story with your kids. Call a friend whom you haven’t spoken to in a long time.
Whatever it is that helps you get out of your head and back on track do that, but more importantly just do something.
